Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Will Google's self-driving cars turn your city into Charleston?

Perhaps! But your vision for the city will determine that. While the
patterns of sprawl can not be transformed easily, I think self-driving
cars have incredible potential to change what we will build in the
future.

Reducing parking spaces per capita is one of
the most promising ways, but by no means is it the only way. Planners
need to be aware that the potential of self-driving technology goes much
further than that. If Google's venture with self-driving technology
proves implementable, how we practice urban design will change in
dramatic ways. The consequences on urban form are not insignificant, and
the ways we move about the city could receive vast gains in energy and
cost efficiencies. How we plan and code for cities will certainly
change, and so it behooves us city planning folk to begin thinking about
this now.

If
self-driving cars become ubiquitous, this Whole Foods on Magazine Street
in New Orleans demonstrates how I believe all big box stores will
relate to the street in the future. This store provides no off-street
parking. (corrected per anonymous comment).

Until very recently, I was openly
skeptical about the potential for autonomous cars ("robocars" for short)
to do much good for urbanism. In a previous post,
for instance, I reflected on the potential of robocar traffic
synchronization technology to promote freeway construction. Yes, I
strongly suspect that robocar platooning might encourage expansions of
freeways and engineering of roads to maximize free-flow conditions for
high speeds, thus keeping freeways slicing through city centers. At the
very least, they will encourage the proliferation of high speed
interchanges. But will North American cities therefore stay fragmented
and sprawly?

In that post, I was quick to suspect that
they would for a number of reasons. This was because I was highly
pessimistic at the time about the potential of automated driving to
significantly alter the sprawl-loving lifestyles of most Americans. I
also questioned whether autonomous taxis (ATs or "aTaxis") could do this
even if they have a real potential to change American consumer habits
for personal vehicle ownership.

I still have some
doubts about ATs reaching high market share levels, but the growing
clout of Lyft and Uber, coupled with urban lifestyle changes, are
developments that make me pause to reconsider. I realize that the
business case for robocar carsharing (be it ATs or peer-to-peer) is
currently being forged and, indeed, is proving disruptively significant.
Except for sport, some are already theorizing that it could become the only way we use automobiles.
Carsharing and ridesharing, as performed by companies like Uber
(including their UberPool service) and Car2go, are currently paving the
way to carsharing with robocar fleets. They are already building that
market, only with human drivers.

So from the moment Google's self-driving cars start entering the marketplace, I suspect Robin Chase is
right to believe that much of the driving population will forgo vehicle
ownership in short order. That day could arrive with a speed that may
surprise us. The main reasons I suspect this are the advantages robocars
can provide in sheer convenience coupled with the many raw benefits of
the sharing economy. Moreover, any kind of carsharing that is able to
reach efficiencies of scale with wide adoption could literally blow out
of the water any rival form of automobile use, and robocars, for good
reasons, stand a chance of capturing that kind of level of adoption -
even if it is only a partial level of adoption by most individuals using
them.

For one, automated driving helps us exploit much
better the lost resource represented in keeping cars empty and parked
all the time. It means the vehicle doesn't always have to be parked (at
least not at the place where you actually disembark from it). No coveted
spots to circle around. No repetitive circuits downtown trolling for an
open parking spot. A robocar has an inbuilt valet service, and while it
could continue circulating without you to go park itself, that
situation lends itself immediately to the cost and energy benefits of
sharing. The vehicle can now go on to serve another individual if not
pick up someone else at the very spot you dismounted. Parked vehicles
without occupants represent wasted space and rusting metal, not to
mention human time and expense. Driverless technology puts the pressure
on us to capture this latent resource, and I suspect Google and
entrepreneurs will quickly move to exploit it. Many have realized that
this simple move will drive down the number of vehicles we will need per
capita (and if coupled with empowered transit services, I suspect
significantly so).

But the convenience granted in the
user's experience of robocars is the overlooked game-changer. That is
the salient factor that I completely missed before!

First of all, everybody can enjoy the equivalent of "Doris Day Parking"
with robocars. Like Doris Day dismounting from her vehicle at the curb
in front of her covered apartment entry, you will nearly always hop off
from your robocar directly at the curbside before your destination. That
kind of convenience is why even really well-off people heavily use
taxis in places like Manhattan in the first place: the relative
inconvenience involved in storing and retrieving personal automobiles
most anywhere you want to go in Manhattan is simply too much to bear.

Since
the advantages of not actually having to drive a car or park it is
something taxis or Uber can provide us, the extra benefit granted to you
by a robocar is the fact that you never have to worry again about
maintaining your
driving eligibility or insurability. Think about that! If you have a
driver's license, you probably take this benefit for granted, but I will
call this a great advantage, since it is actually not insignificant.

But
when a robocar is shared, instead of personally owned, the convenience
advantages continue to pile on. As a competitive advantage to vehicle
ownership, carsharing reaching the scale of ubiquitous adoption is
extremely compelling and disruptive, since, think about it, you as the
user no longer have to worry about owning the car, maintaining it, nor
housing it. Nor do you need to stay near its parked location. Your
mobility becomes completely unlinked from the automobile. What's more,
you no longer have to put up with the long-term necessities of
ownership, such as worrying about accommodating the near constant
mismatch between the vehicle you buy and your full array of vehicle
needs.

So we have the following clear advantages with carshared googlecars:

(1) The advantage of foregoing driving eligibility
(2) The advantage of foregoing vehicle ownership
(3) The advantage of tailored and atomized automobility
(4) The advantage of freeing your rents and real estate from providing automobile storage

By
"tailored and atomized automobility" I mean many things which we don't
typically account for as as car owners. These include being freed from
personal investment in the long-term
maintenance of a vehicle. A big one we don't think about is being freed
from our invested choice in one or two vehicles we can own at a time.
Being locked into one or two
vehicles to serve all your typical trip needs is a large burden that
locks us out of a full array of automobiles to suit a particular trip
need very specifically - that could include adding a utility, making
some trips more luxurious, or making others more efficient and cheaper.

All
four of those benefits are actually one advantage: the advantage of
having your mobility completely delinked from automobile ownership.

If
you own a vehicle, take a pause here to think deliberately about your
life without that advantage for a few minutes. Think about all the
obligations in your life to address each of its burdens, and all the
particular steps they involve, not only the scheduling and the payments,
but their indirect repercussions on your life choices. For example, if
you commute to your office job in an SUV or pickup, think of the
outright waste and inefficiency that represents. What would happen
should you suddenly be liberated from each of those deficits and
demands, and you discover that, hey, you have just about the same
mobility with a carshared service as you would with a personally owned
car? In fact, your mobility may go up, if for no other reason than you
can afford your mobility better and scale it to your actual needs.
Carsharing with robocars may be able to afford you this kind of liberty
even in the outlying scrublands of suburbia!

Are you sensing how radically your life could be reconfigured?

Now... Lets just begin to think about the land use and urban design changes that may be in our horizon...

Retail

If
we share them collectively or use them as ATs, the potential of robocars to transform our sprawl pattern is quite significant because
they would dramatically lessen the need for parking spaces. That has
radical implications I don't have to explain.

But there
is another important consequence we should anticipate and that is the
fact that the needs of retailers to capture customers will probably
change greatly - in fact, I speculate this need could catalyze the most
dramatic consequence of automated driving on urban form and real estate
markets. What matters here is not just that the parking can go away (or
at least the provision of parking near most destinations), it is how
uses are suddenly reoriented to serve their customers arriving via
carshared robocars. What happens when you discover that the greater
portion of your customers or users is now arriving via ancy robocars,
which can park themselves or be traded off between entering and
departing customers as if they were a public commodity?

I
think businesses are suddenly going to sense a great need to
immediately front the parcel with their entries in order to receive
their customer competitively at the curbside drop-off point. At last,
the new urbanist street section has a compelling advantage over the
strip center in terms of the one factor that really matters in sprawl: the convenience to the customer!

This Walgreens
on Magazine Street in New Orleans needs no exterior signage for the
"Walgreens" brand. Instead, its cosmetics section is prominently
situated at the storefront. Both this Walgreens and the Whole Foods in
Uptown New Orleans (above top) have realized that linear feet of
frontage near the curb is the resource that is vital. When you don't
need to provide parking and signs to attract customers, as in the days
before the car, all that matters is what you offer as an attractive
experience. No more decorated shed nor duck. There is just "a shed with delights".

In terms of the way we value property with
robocar carsharing in denser areas, particularly retail and commercial
property, what this means is that we will probably return to the prewar
era of primarily valuing property in terms of a lot's curbside frontage.
Believe it or not, the shorthand way our predecessors evaluated
relative commercial property values formerly was in terms linear feet of
frontage (not building price per square foot). Indeed, that's the
reason we repeatedly built urbanism before the world wars. It was simply
the most important factor impacting commercial property value. It was
the comparatively high value we placed on street frontage that compelled
people to build right to the property line without setbacks, because
that was where you met all your customers and where you competed with
your neighbors for them. Building to the property line maximized
building value.

As carsharing grows to allow stores and
restaurants to cut down and even eliminate the need to provide
off-street parking, expect linear feet of frontage to commensurably
become more expensive in real estate terms. Exact dimensions of
storefront length, actually, will more than likely be tied to customer
turnover rates at peak shopping hours. A sufficient expanse of window
space to catch the passersby's attention will be valued. I suspect
stores will start to become tall and multistory as a rule, like the
urban department stores of the past. The Fifth Avenue effect. Many of
these anticipated effects, in terms of real estate economy, strikingly
resemble the forms of the pre-automobile era of urban development!

Environment

What the carsharing that is
propelled by autonomous cars will enable us to capture at significant
scales is the lost usable service potential of automobiles. Presently,
only taxi cab and Uber/Lyft fleets currently capture this efficiency.
Carsharing increases the number of trips an individual car can serve
over its usable life. With carsharing, you are, in effect, capturing
more trips per net pound of manufactured goods. In gross, the
efficiencies gained from carshared vehicles really will add a net total
benefit to the environment, enabling the same mobility to consumers for
less impact, representing less wasted energy, less material life-costs
(embodied energy) and less raw material intake for the same number of
vehicle miles traveled. A lot of these gains are simply plugging in to
the latent capacity that our present ownership-based transport system simply locks us out of. These are thus gains that
can help us offset rising energy costs if we address latent demand for
cheaper mobility effectively, using, of course, transit...

Transit

Does
transit go away with robocars, by the way? Not at all! I believe
transit will in fact become stronger if for the simple reason that
divorced from vehicle-ownership, the economic advantage of using transit
as part of your daily trip routines pencils out financially.

Where
one can, one will save money sharing trips with strangers. That math
could be easily compared with AT/carsharing apps that will more than
likely be tailored to showing you your best route and trip options
(Google-style) in terms of the bottom line: the actual dollar cost of a
trip. Moreover, transit will be vitally important
to reducing congestion in the peak times. To prevent hordes of robocars
suddenly causing gridlock in the streets (since they won't
necessarily be stored near their users any longer, remember),
municipalities will
probably build up their transit lines to move more people in and out of
the
downtowns and office centers. AT fleets will correspondingly charge
higher rates to prevent gridlock and to encourage modal shifts (gridlock
hurts them too - especially if it is gridlock produced by empty
vehicles).
In that situation, AT users entering the transit market will realize
that the longer they manage to stay on transit for their commutes the
cheaper and more reliable life gets. I think transit will suddenly be
valued politically more evenly in a toe-to-toe contest with its main
subsidized rival, the freeway.

Because of the dynamic
of transit mixing, I think carshared fleets will operate
in home "sectors" that circulate people locally, expecting people to
plug into to high capacity transit lines for the longer/cross-town/peak
trips. AT
companies may prefer this situation because their fleets become more
manageable when most of their vehicles are circulating near one another
and they can
store and service their vehicles more readily in the down times
(otherwise they could be eating the costs of retrieving their empty
vehicles from other home sectors and far away places). So, in the
future,
I strongly suspect carsharing and transit will work hand in hand. They
will be thought
about together as one greater
system, rather than our present tendency to think of them as mutually
exclusive "options". This gets to the core of what I mean by the benefit
of "atomized" mobility. Yes, wealthier folks could use their shared or
personally owned robocars for all trips, regardless of time or
distance, but even they will benefit, because they will no longer be
stuck in traffic with hordes of other people with a 9-to-5 job who have a
latent demand for convenient transit, but are locked into needing to
store and look after their own vehicles. This is important to realize.
Folks that commute with singly occupied automobiles are commuting as much to take care of their car (because it must ultimately be stored where they sleep) as they are to get from point A to point B.
Robocars free them of this. It cuts an invisible umbilical
that many of us don't realize is suppressing our freedom. And when it
does, transit will reap the benefits.

Urban Form

Without
transit in the mix to limit congestion, self-driving
cars will punish uses that centralize too much in the city, meaning
similar uses will have to scatter geographically. Cities like Houston
and LA and North Carolina's Research Triangle, with their scattered
metropolitan centers, will likely be in a good situation to ease their
way quickly into wide-scale robocar adoption. Both transit and robocar
carsharing are more efficient in multicenter metros. In more
centralized metros, like Charlotte, robocar carsharing will actually
compel
municipalities to devote more resources and attention to transit network
improvements lest they will mire their cores in robocar gridlock at the
peak times. I anticipate robocar commuting will be possible,
of course, but quite expensive in these cities since AT
companies will likely use dynamic pricing structures like Uber's to
mediate supply and demand. Expect to see most people commuting into and out of job centers using high capacity transit.

Since
self-driving vehicles will tend to be always circulating with or sans
occupants, instead of spending their time parked somewhere off the
street, they will always be in the street grid swarming to the serve
their clients at their destination points. People will sense the
activity of an area by noting the rates of vehicle level changes on the
streets and discerning where the swarm of vehicles are gravitating to,
thus sending signals to everyone about the hives of activity in the
city. They will make viscerally clear the exchange of human meetings and
transactions geographically. The traveling "swarms" will give us an
interesting new and dynamic "psychogeography" of our cities because
traffic will no longer just represent humans moving through but the
thickening of human activity, corresponding to the numbers of people
entering and leaving specific areas. During business hours in the middle of the
day, for example, vehicles will move out of the city center to disperse
into the city and then start congregating downtown again at afternoon
peak time. What will be the new behaviors, land use distributions and
urban pathologies that will emerge? What words will need to be invented
to describe these? Urban designers should try to anticipate what they
might be, and what all of this entails, sooner rather than later!

Mapping for Traffic Control

One problem
limiting Google's ability to introduce its autonomous vehicles is the
mapping infrastructure that is needed. But I think Google can largely
crowdsource the mapping from the early adopters who will have every
incentive to do so. After early adopters, cyclists will chip in, eager
to create de facto "bikeways" by cartographically indicating street
zones where cars better bugger off, thank you very much. We will see an
amazingly innovative period in street design using signalling and
feedback from Google Maps and the manual input of robocar users. This
feedback will eventually allow every street to "teach itself" how the
traffic should best navigate and flow through it. Urban Design is going
to get much more organic and decentralized. Google's robocar mapping
could empower local constituencies, or, on the other hand, it could
empower the mandates of dictatorial DOTs. It depends on who first uses the tool
effectively early on. As urban designers, we need to move in quickly to
ensure that we implement inventively to empower locals in the Wild West
period of robocar introduction and to make sure that we demonstrate the
raw of potential of allowing self-adapting, organic paradigms of
traffic control to emerge.

There's still lot's more to say on all that and more, but it will have to wait till another good evening...

To wrap up, while the new tool of autonomous driving will have many upsides, it can
serve sprawl and conventional ways of doing things every bit as much as
its latent ability to do great things for walkable, more congenial and
humane fabrics like the Charleston peninsula. The potential to sprawlify
or to make Charleston with this tool is equally there. Planners and urban designers can't be lazy. We
must be ready to spring to action when robocar fleets arrive to do what can make us prosperous in a new day. So, let's start thinking harder
about these potentials!

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Both the Whole Foods and Walgreen's pictured on Magazine Street have off street parking behind the building, for Whole Foods in the rear of the former streetcar barn that houses it, and the Walgreen's parking is on lots that formerly contained homes. It's certainly better, but the bus stop isn't covered, there is hardly any bike parking and pedestrians have a rough time crossing at unmarked crosswalks, so I feel it is still car - first development.

Improv

I practice architecture and urban design in Charlotte, N.C., often as a consultant in transportation projects. The rest of my time I help layout the developments of the clients of the firm I work for. While I'd like to be an urbanist, if anything, I'm an expert in the layout of parking lots. For now, just consider me an "aspiring urbanist", until governments allow me to practice what I preach.